


la craie et le charbon de bois

by mybelovedcheshire



Category: Les Misérables - Victor Hugo
Genre: M/M, fluffy cute fluff mcflufferness, genuinely no idea, i have no idea if this is modern or book!verse
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-01-29
Updated: 2013-01-29
Packaged: 2017-11-27 09:58:18
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 770
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/660669
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/mybelovedcheshire/pseuds/mybelovedcheshire
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Joly studies anatomy while Bossuet cleans their room. Naturally, as is the fate of star-crossed lovers, these events must collide, rather than coincide.</p>
            </blockquote>





	la craie et le charbon de bois

“Are these Feuilly’s?” Bossuet asked. He had a long, thin box in his hands. 

Joly didn’t look up from his text book. “Hmm?”

Bossuet peeled the scarf that he’d been using to protect his nose from dust as he cleaned away from his face. “These,” he added, shaking the box. It rattled. “I think I’ve seen him using them.”

He opened the box -- it was made of wood, and had a sliding lid with a catch to protect the fragile charcoal sticks inside. 

“Why buy them, though?” Bossuet mused out loud. “He doesn’t have very much money-- unless they were given to him, but even then. They’re just blackened twigs, aren’t they?” He sniffed the box. 

It may have seemed like a strange decision -- and a bad one, given Bossuet’s predilection to misfortune -- but sometimes when a man is faced with a curious object, he often has no other choice. 

The sneeze that inevitably followed startled Joly so badly that the medical student knocked his textbook to the floor. In a state of half-panic, he clutched his chest and whined miserably. 

Bossuet laughed, and smiled, and rubbed his nose on his arm as he apologised. 

“Charcoal,” he casually explained, holding one up. 

Joly stared at him. 

Bossuet sheepishly closed the box.

“No-- wait,” Joly stood up and walked over, pulling the charcoal out of Bossuet’s hands. He experimentally drew a line across his arm. 

“Joly?”

Joly tapped the end of the charcoal stick with one finger as he considered something. After a brief moment, he tried the same thing on Bossuet’s arm -- taking his wrist and turning his hand over so he could make a mark on a lighter area of skin, where the charcoal might show. Bossuet couldn’t resist a slightly wry grin. 

“Do we have chalk?” Joly asked. He didn’t wait for an answer -- he cross over to the shelf where Bossuet had found some of Feuilly’s art supplies and rooted around. To their strange good fortune, there was a single stick of chalk tucked in little felt bag. 

He retreated, chalk in one hand and charcoal in the other. Bossuet followed on his heels, curious about what he could possibly be thinking. 

“Lay down,” Joly instructed, with the authoritative tone he always adopted when he was studying medicine.

“What are you doing?” Bossuet asked smoothly, still smiling. He was so enamoured with Joly -- with the way an idea could grip him, and take him over in a single moment. 

Joly set the chalk and charcoal aside and reached for Bossuet’s shirt, tugging it off quickly. Bossuet didn’t protest -- he had no reason to. “Lay down,” Joly insisted again, pushing him back into their bed gently. 

Bossuet did as he was told, sinking down into the mattress. “Am I going to be allowed to participate?”

But Joly was up and bustling around. He snatched up his textbook, the charcoal and and chalk, and came back to the bed again. 

The curtains fluttered at the window, catching Bossuet’s eye. A whole, vibrant world existed just outside their little flat -- but he didn’t care. The shadows and the dust and the quirky, wonderful man climbing into bed beside him was worth more to him than the whole of Paris. 

“Hold this.” Joly pushed his book into Bossuet’s hands, and opened it to the page he’d been studying. Now Bossuet could see the anatomical diagrams that had perplexed and distressed his young love for the last hour or so. 

And then Joly began to draw. In charcoal, he outlined the most important bones from his lesson -- focusing on the ribs, and working his way upwards. The bones weren’t a critical component of his studies, and in that respect, the dark charcoal against Bossuet’s similarly dark skin made a beautiful impression. But in the much brighter chalk, he added in the organs -- the liver, the stomach, the lungs, and the heart. Occasionally he mixed both, and muttered to himself as he poked and prodded and observed the complexities his school-work at its source. 

Bossuet silently watched, and remained still. He generously ignored the occasional mutter about a ‘hard liver’ or ‘strange nodules’ -- it was just Joly’s way, and while it annoyed their other friends... Bossuet adored it. 

Bossuet cherished every little quirk that made Joly as sweet and happy as he genuinely was. 

The others saw him only as the man of science -- the hypochondriac -- the _malaide imaginaire_. But Bossuet knew better. 

Joly sat up slowly, beaming. 

“What?” Bossuet asked softly. 

Joly looked down at him, brimming with that very cheerfulness that Bossuet idolised. “It makes perfect sense now.”

They both laughed.


End file.
